Center Mission
While Rice’s expertise and pioneering efforts to develop a rapid electric-flash synthesis have been the basis of the collaboration, the University has also supported the spin-off of three new companies to help accomplish ERDC’s mission to help solve the DoD’s most challenging civil and military engineering.
The mission of R-PARC within the Rice WaTER Institute is to create technologies that will destroy PFAS, commercialize these technologies via entrepreneurship and industrial partnerships and thereby mitigate the threat of this class of contaminants in our environment.
Technical Approach
By leveraging DoD/university partnerships, ERDC began an effort with Rice University in 2021 on the rapid electric-flash synthesis and deployment of graphene into commercial markets. Further, this ERDC/Rice University collaboration as led to a flash method to recover rare earth elements and other critical metals from electronic wastes and retired batteries, thereby minimizing (or even mitigating) the need for mining and providing a route to critical-metals independence from foreign suppliers.
The commercial deployment of this flash technology is now extending to soil remediation from PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances), toxic organics, and toxic metals, thereby establishing a route to clean our nation’s contaminated legacy sites. Moreover, massive storage units of PFAS-laden toxic firefighter foams, and PFAS-contaminated carbons from water purifiers, can be converted into non-toxic materials by this co-developed electric-flash method.